Big data and the race to save coral reefs

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Anderson Mayfield explains that predictive modeling can help determine which reefs are more susceptible to environmental stress - and which are most resilient.With climate change prompting rapid coral bleaching on global scales, marine biologist Anderson Mayfield uses predictive modeling to prioritize conservation efforts. You can hear more about his work in a recent episode of Statistically Speaking or read about it in a back issue of JMP Foreword magazine.

“I think it’s the time for a least a few of us to start making these transitions. We’re just explaining things that happened in the past. ‘Oh, this reef died because of an oil spill.’

“That’s all well and good, but if you have the opportunity or the data set with which you can start making predictions about reefs that haven’t yet died, you might actually be able to do something proactive and save that reef.

“So, basically, I went from just writing coral reef obituaries to kind of thinking of myself as a coral reef actuary. I’m not going to know the exact date this reef is going to die, but I might be able to tell you that this reef over here is in worse shape than this reef over here," says Mayfield, who jointly works for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Miami.

“And I want to at least have this triage capacity to where we can go to a manager and say ‘Based on our data (which is all being fueled by JMP Pro), based on these predictive models we’ve made, we think this reef over here is the one that’s going to be a refuge. The corals, for whatever reason, are super resilient. This one over here is stress susceptible.’

“I’m not sure which one you might want to prioritize, but I least want to have the data in hand to be able to make these kind of decisions.”